Just got broadband working yesterday, and it’s been smooth so far. It took me quite a while to configure the linux NAT firewall even though I’ve been using it for more than 2 years with a modem! I’ve also set up the firewall on our office LAN. I eventually narrowed the problem down to a bad network card. I replaced the card in the firewall and everyone was talking happily to each other (I mean the machines)

Speed is quite good at 512Kbps down (I know that’s pathetic compared to what people in some other countries get, but I’m digressing …) I’ve heard of over 8Mbps down in Denmark or Holland or something and over 100Mbps in Japan!! That’s insane!

Apple unveiled their iTunes Music Store for Windows yesterday, along with a couple of accessories for the iPod: a voice recording accessory, and a media storage device so you can now store your digital pictures on your iPod. I must say this is amazing, and so insanely useful! My wife has a voice recorder which she can conveniently dump for this, and now you can store your pictures on the iPod hard disk (among other things).

As if that wasn’t enough, the new music store is just amazing, absolutely amazing. The Keynote speech was amazing too, Sarah McLachlan did a live performance, and Steve Jobs (Apple CEO) talked live using iSight to Bono (U2), Dr. Dre, and Mick Jagger (Rolling Stones). Steve has a flair for these things and it shows. All these musicians love the music store basically, and were there to sort of say ‘it’s great, we love it too’. The iSight is an amazing gadget. Some journalists attending the event thought it was a live satellite linkup, when in fact it was just a web-based video chat using iSight and iChatAV. They were confused because the quality is so good you need to see it to believe it. (They were displaying this on an almost cinema sized screen and it looked just like a satellite linkup!) I watched the keynote myself last night (thank you broadband

What else? They’ve added many new features to iTunes. 5,000 audiobooks, gift certificates, allowances! (for the kids), celebrity playlists (find out what Sting likes to listen to, and why), it’s just so amazing. The saddest thing is that this is not yet available outside the States. I can’t wait for it to be. I can still use the store though, and listen to all the 30-second previews, the only thing I can’t do is buy music. There are videos there as well.

Blaine is out tomorrow, he’s blacking out a lot and suffering from palpitations. He’ll be taken to hospital straight away and will be on a drip for a few days before they start feeding him properly. He says he will probably never try anything like this again. I wish I could have gone to see him, I didn’t get the chance.

Woohoo! I’ve just placed my order for the new version of OSX, codenamed Panther. I qualified for the special upgrade offer for new Mac owners, and I got it for 14 pounds! This release (10.3) adds quite a number of new features, such as Expose, improved Finder, better Unix support, improved Preview for PDFs and PS files, overall improved system performance, and many more. I will wait a while before I install it though, I want to see other people’s experiences first, although Panther has gone through extensive testing and tons of people have already been using it for months.

I must point out, as many others are already, this is probably the first OS update I have seen by a company which actually improves performance relative to its predecessors. Each successive release of Windows, for example, required more processing power, more RAM, more HD space, etc. But Panther improves the experience for a lot of folks, from G3 iBook owners to G5 owners This is quite an achievement.

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I’m posting this using NetNewsWire which is an RSS aggregator available on OSX. Simply put, it gathers news for me daily from several different websites and shows it to me in a nice 2 or 3-paned view, like many email readers. This is immensely useful as I no longer have to go hunting through several webpages each morning to get my all my news, it’s all there in one convenient place, and I don’t even have to remember to go to particular sites as my favorite sites are always checked! One of my favorite pieces of software to date There is a fully working free version, but the paid version (which I’m using) also allows me to post to my weblog! Neat.

On the Mac OSX front, Panther has just been announced to be released on Oct 24, I can imagine what that’s going to be like for hundreds of thousands of Mac lovers who are probably going to be queuing up for it that night. I wonder if they do anything special like that in London, we’ll see. There’s a neat countdown timer on the apple website too! Here’s a sampling of what panther looks like, and some new features.

I’ve just ordered ADSL from PlusNET which is quite a popular ISP nowadays for broadband. I still haven’t managed to snag a cheap modem off of ebay, am hoping to do that soon, but it looks like I’ll probably have to buy one at retail price Unfortunately, the area where we live also has strange problems with things like phone lines, and satellite dishes, so I’m thinking that they may not be able to deploy it here at all … fingers crossed …